> I think this comes because the "sense of self" is a process that reflexively takes you as primary and indivisible
Only if you reduce the sense of self to ego function, and a western one at that.
Self is a much more complicated process. And good models of it already acknowledge functional and content heterogeneity eg subpersonalities, embodiment, aspirations, narratives, personhood, boundary problems etc. Self exists because it solves these problems and doing so was adaptive.
> It seems like remarkable that people don't want to imagine there are the rough equivalent of many, many software layers between the level of the neuron and the level of "reason", "emotions", "self", "consciousness" and etc
This is a false dichotomy. We already know we have a grab bag of specialized accelerator “hardware”, but also soft/firm-ware layers that glue things together. That’s the whole point of the article, you can’t encode autobiographical memories without hippocampus but that’s not the only thing hippocampus does nor it is the only thing required to encode those memories.
And people have already upped the ante on this; Cartesian reductionism of trapping “computation” upstairs is also wrong. Cognition requires an embodied and embedded agent. It is not even a mere “brain-thing”.
Only if you reduce the sense of self to ego function, and a western one at that.
Self is a much more complicated process. And good models of it already acknowledge functional and content heterogeneity eg subpersonalities, embodiment, aspirations, narratives, personhood, boundary problems etc. Self exists because it solves these problems and doing so was adaptive.
> It seems like remarkable that people don't want to imagine there are the rough equivalent of many, many software layers between the level of the neuron and the level of "reason", "emotions", "self", "consciousness" and etc
This is a false dichotomy. We already know we have a grab bag of specialized accelerator “hardware”, but also soft/firm-ware layers that glue things together. That’s the whole point of the article, you can’t encode autobiographical memories without hippocampus but that’s not the only thing hippocampus does nor it is the only thing required to encode those memories.
And people have already upped the ante on this; Cartesian reductionism of trapping “computation” upstairs is also wrong. Cognition requires an embodied and embedded agent. It is not even a mere “brain-thing”.